Well, I met with the new oral surgeon and really liked him. He is new to the area but has 12 years experience in practice in the military. He has lots of experience doing coronoidectomies although not on patients who have radiated tissue. But, again, my ENT who will also be there does have that experience.

What I liked best is he spent lots of time with me (and my husband who came along to help ask questions) and did a very thorough exam with x rays and also feeling inside my mouth as well as outside feeling the muscles around the jaw.

The long and the short of it is he doesn't want to do a coronoidectomy right away. I have a couple of big bands of scar tissue on my inner cheeks (next to teeth with big fillings so maybe got more radiation than they should have), and he wants to remove that scar tissue as well as get inside to the muscles and see if there are pieces of muscles that are scarred that he can remove and leave the good muscle (he won't know for sure if there is any "good muscle" until he gets in there but he thinks there might be). He wants to follow this up with really rigourous physical therapy (mainly using the therabite) and see how much of an increase on range of motion that gives me, then maybe follow it up with additional surgery if need be.

He felt the muscle that is above your cheekbone kind at the temples because that is an extension of the muscle that would be relaesed by removing the coronoid process ( I could look up the name of the muscle in my anatomy textbook which I bought a year ago to help me understand the various issues I was having but don't have the time right now). It is a muscle connected to chewing. He said it actually felt like mine had atrophied-which makes sense since I have had to stick to things that don't require much chewing for the last three years. Since it has atrophied, he said the coronoidectomy might not really make that much of a difference--that the trismus and jaw cramping problems may be due to scarring in other muscles.

Also he said with the coronoidectomy there IS a chance of osteoradionecrosis, which my ENT had been dismisive about. He said it isn't a big risk because of the location, which should have been mainly out of the radiation field and that it's a very narrow piece of bone they cut off--it doesn't leave a gaping hole in the jawbone the way a tooth extraction does. But there is still some risk which is why he doesn't want to do it unless he is pretty sure it will help.

In short, he seemed knowledgable about risks and cautious in his approach and took more time with me over this than I have been able to get from my ENT, who is always kind of rushed. The entire appointment left me feeling less fearful nd more hopeful. So I now have surgery scheduled with both of them on the 30th and we'll go from there.

Mel and Malka, thanks for the feedback about the D&C. I had one after a miscarriage years ago myself and after I was very VERY tired and weak for a few days but now I think that was more because of the miscarriage than the D&C itself. It turns out, because it isn't an emergency, they can't get me in before the 30th so I'll have to schedule it for the end of the month, probably around when my semester starts but hopefully I can have it on a Friday so I have the weekend to recover.

David, I'd take the Hanging In There award now but I'm superstitious and worry it's like tempting fate......Anyway, there are a lot of people here who deserve that award I think!

Nelie